Mercury puts on its third face during the superior conjunction, analogous to the opposition and the Full Moon. Now is the moment the "seed message" impressed upon Mercury at the beginning of its cycle receives the light of meaning. It is also when Mercury is brightest and smallest, because most distance from the Earth and its biological compulsions. About five days after the superior conjunction, Mercury appears as an "evening star" near the in the western horizon, setting shortly after the Sun. The mind is most objective and deliberate in its operation about forty days after the superior conjunction, when Mercury’s velocity is reduced to match the Sun’s daily motion (after which it begins moving through the zodiac slower than the Sun). At the same time it also reaches its maximum distance from the Sun (corresponding with the waning square aspect and the third-quarter lunation type), representing a high degree of mental deliberation.
During the Epimethean hemicycle, what Rudhyar calls the "evolutionary, associative and generalizing aspect" of the mind dominates. The Epimethean-Direct mental type is characterized by a growing sense of a long-range, objective and historical perspective. It symbolizes a mind in which eagerness and impulsiveness have given way to careful deliberation. Here the calculated risk replaces the intuitive gamble. It is often seen in the birth charts of gurus, spiritual teachers and religious leaders — transmitters and custodians of the many particular traditions.
If your Mercury type is Epimethean-Direct, you probably have a practical, objective and analytical mind leading you to act on the basis of facts and past experience rather than on hunches and gut-feelings. Your well-organized mental faculties enable you to manage people and run things. But in doing so, you may need to keep an open mind and avoid rigid thought patterns.
As a third face of Mercury type, you are success-oriented and work hard to fulfill plans and goals. To realize your goals, you draw upon knowledge acquired though past experience and by observing the achievements and mistakes of others. Indeed, this is the main area were Promethean types and Epimethean types most differ in their approach: Promethean types eagerly forge ahead to pursue a vision or intuition flash; Epimetheans, regardless of how intuitive and impulsive they may be, tend to first distance themselves mentally and attempt to look at things objectively, to consider what past experience can offer the situation. Epimetheans can be daring and radical thinkers, but they tend to see their free-thinking as part of a tradition operating within a historical context or movement.
The Epimethean-Direct type is seen in the birth charts of three of the most influential minds of the nineteenth century, individuals whose work figures largely in the development of the collective mentality of the twentieth century. Karl Marx,
Charles Darwin and
Sigmund Freud. Their work has made, in much different ways, a tremendous impact on current mentality. They formulated revolutionary theories based respectively on the study of historical and political precedents, the observation of biological types, and the study of psychological processes and disturbances. Leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution,
Lenin and Trotsky, are also examples of Mercury’s third face. Other examples include
Albert Einstein,
J. Krishnamurti, George Gurdjieff and Indira Gandhi.
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